Richard Scully, Associate Professor in Modern European History at the
University of New England (Armidale, New South Wales, Australia)

The following is the first of several extracts from the author's "A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a Model Publication, 1841-1936," originally published in the International Journal of Comic Art 15/2 (Fall 2013): 6-35. We are grateful to Professor Scully for allowing us to reprint some passages and images from it here. — Jacqueline Banerjee

[D]espite its unique status among comic papers, aside from a very few
studies (Douglas, 1994; Bryant, 2008; Codell, 2006; Scully, 2012), the
importance of Punch for that greatest of nineteenth-century enterprises — the British
Empire — has been little appreciated. The otherwise unrivaled work of the late
Richard D. Altick (1997) did not deal in depth with Punch as a key disseminator
of imperial ideology, and did not touch upon the role Punch played as the
center of its own "informal" empire. Not only was the London Charivari itself circulated widely throughout the British Empire — appearing on the news-stands from Montreal to Melbourne — but it spawned a whole host of colonial
and other imitators. Some of these colonial Charivaris were short-lived — such
as Punch in Canada (1849-1850) (above left), Tasmanian Punch (1866-1879)
(above centre), and Cape Punch (1888) (above right) in South Africa — but many represented
the first flowerings of a British style of satirical journalism that (together with
its American counterpart) has arguably come to infuse all global political
cartooning and caricature. The longer-lasting Melbourne Punch (1855-1925),
Sydney Punch (1856-1857; 1864-1888), Hindu Punch (1871-1909), and Awadh [or Oudh] Punch (1877-1936), may have begun their lives as peripheral imitators
ofthe metropolitan paper, but came to embody aspects of the emerging national
consciousnesses of the Australian colonies and Indian provinces, and were
foundations of the Australian and Indian traditions of comic art. [8-9]